Pros & Cons:

Can be used to create a database of computed hashes and revalidate against it.

Only MD5 and SHA1 algorithms are supported. Only works in a command window. The program's options are difficult to understand and use effectively, and the help provided is of limited usefulness as it has some inaccuracies.

Our Review:

Microsoft File Checksum Integrity Verifier (FCIV) is a console application, which means that it only runs inside a command window. You might wonder why such a program would be considered here, but there is a unique capability provided by this program that is worth a look. For computing the hash of a single file, this would not be the tool to use, but it can be used to create a database of hashes for many files, including recursively through an entire file system, and then later use that database to re-validate those same files.

FCIV only computes hashes using the MD5 and SHA-1 algorithms. The purpose of this program is to provide a method by which large numbers of files can be validated very quickly thus exposing unauthorized modifications. The following command can be used to generate a database of hashes for all ".exe" and ".dll" files below C:\Program Files using both MD5 and SHA-1:

If you leave out the type argument(s), it will compute hashes for all files that it finds. The following command can be used to validate the database against the same files at a later time:

fciv -v -both -xml c:\temp\pf.xml The program will report any differences that it finds. It does not report the presence of new files, but it does report any files of the original set that are missing. The setup of the program is entirely manual. After extracting it from the download, the program must be copied to a location that is in the command path or its extracted folder must be added to the path. Once this is done, it can be executed from any command window. To get help information about the program, type "fciv -h". The help information includes examples, but there are some differences between the information provided and the way the program actually behaves.

Microsoft File Checksum Integrity Verifier was reviewed by
Gizmos Freeware on 2017-04-02
based on version 1.0.